The 12 Tips of Christmas: Unwrap Search + Social Best Practices

As another year is coming to a close, marketers are approaching the peak shopping season, bringing abundant opportunity to engage audiences with high intent. Delivering consistent, relevant cross-channel messaging is a must in order to influence all touch points in the consumer shopping journey.

Skai has put together “The 12 Tips of Christmas” to guide your sleigh this season and produce optimal results across your search and social marketing campaigns. Our tipsheet highlights both strategic and tactical best practices paired with pointers on how to leverage the Kneshoo platform to achieve your goals.

Optimize your seasonal search and social efforts with these 12 tips… and a partridge in a pear tree.

1. Analyze historical data to understand past performance and adjust current program to produce more optimal results. Don’t be afraid to increase bids and open up budgets to account for heavy competition on key dates.
2. Use forecasting tools to gain insights into future performance, particularly on key dates such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to understand potential return at various spending levels.
3. Expand keywords to include holiday-specific terms. Be sure to implement a strategic negative strategy to ensure your budget isn’t going towards unwanted, unqualified search queries.
4. Develop relevant, seasonal-specific ad copy with clear calls to action. Implement testing to ensure your most effective messaging is used on peak times during the holiday season to drive the most engagement.
5. Utilize Google Shopping campaigns and promote Product Listing Ads (PLAs) with high impact images to draw in shoppers who are ready to purchase.
6. Ensure consumers have an optimal shopping experience across devices and applications with tailored copy and landing pages that allow for a simple, seamless conversion process.
7. Explore local search features so consumers can find brick-and-mortar stores nearby to make purchases and integrate this offline activity to get a full customer picture.
8. Retarget shoppers who have engaged with you in the past to help close the sale or promote complementary products.
9. Channel consumer passion by integrating social sharing options, such as the Pinterest “Pin It” button, into your product pages to drive engagement and sales.
10. Leverage insights from search campaigns to inform your social ad programs and reach your highest-value audiences most likely to convert.
11. Optimize campaigns more frequently during the festive season to continually improve performance.
12. Give credit where credit is due through an integrated, multi-touch attribution that’s tied to bidding.

View the full tipsheet to discover the accompanying Skai Pro tips to help you achieve your program goals through the Skai platform. Follow these best practices and recommendations to make your festive season merry and bright!